Coffeehouse.co.nz

Those of you with eagle eyes may have noticed that in the picture we posted earlier of on the stack of goodies that santa was a grey handle looking thing. My new friend a barcode scanner!

Normal question about now is “A barcode scanner?! What the hell do you want a barcode scanner for?!”

And it’s a pretty reasonable question! On its own it’s pretty useless, but with the little program I’ve managed to throw together tonight I can now scan the barcode on any of my books and, courtesy of a large online retailer, the title and author (plus a whole lot of other info if I want it) is magically returned to me to do what I want with! It should even work for DVDs and CDS too, with minimal extra work. And let me chuck them in a database. Or whatever. The final use has yet to be determined, but it’s been fun so far!

Although getting everything up and running with said retailer took a bit of jumping though hoops. You might have noticed that the books on the right sidebar haven’t been updated for a while. That’s because they made getting the info just a bit harder a while ago, and so the scripts I was using to get the details before stopped working. Hopefully now I can get around to fixing that too!

Yes, it’s winter here and little things keep us entertained!

This entry was posted on Monday, January 4th, 2010 at 8:59 pm and is filed under Geeky Tech Stuff. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.